Automated and semi-automated machines have been employed for processing documents such as bulk mail. Due to the large quantity of mail received by many companies, there has long been a need for efficient sorting of incoming mail.
Further, in many instances it is desirable to obtain image data of the documents received in the mail. However, often the documents are folded and/or the documents received in a batch of mail are random sizes. In order to scan these documents, it is typically necessary to spend considerable time to manually prepare the documents so that the documents can be automatically fed into a scanner. This processing is inefficient, thereby increasing the overall cost of processing the mail and obtaining image data of the documents in the mail.